When Michael Giambra founded his staffing firm ESource in 1995, the firm was one of the first in the industry to hone in on a unique specialty — business training and development.

“I saw a real niche in the training and development field,” says Giambra. “There was no company providing training and development to professionals on a contract basis.”“We’ve been doing it longer than other people and this is all we do,” he said. “We are a pure play training and development staffing company, so we speak the same language as our customers, and we go a little deeper than our competitors.”

ESource has a database of more than 20,000 training professionals. On one occasion, ESource was even able to locate a printing press trainer for a client.By the company’s second year, its annual revenues had jumped from $400,000 to $2 million. Nearly two decades later ESource still has the same niche approach — an attribute that Giambra says continues to set the firm apart in an increasingly competitive market.

Still, one of the training industry’s biggest hurdles is how closely it is tied to the national economy, said Giambra. When the economy collapses as it did in 2009, training budgets are the first to be cut. Now, he said he is starting to see strong signs of a turnaround.

“When times are rough, we follow that roughness, but when times start trending upward again, like they are right now, we are the first to feel it,” He said. “There is so much pent-up demand for training and development when the economy starts coming back.”